I've
always been particularly fond of Halloween and the month of October
in general. I like the weather. I like the fact that the sun goes
away earlier. I like the trees changing color or I would if I
lived anywhere else besides Los Angeles. Stupid city. Most of all, I
love that for thirty-one days, people embrace their inner dark side
and turn their front yards into cemeteries, drape skeletons and
cobwebs all over their porch and proudly display hollowed-out gourds
carved with hideous facial expressions. Screw Christmas. This is the
most wonderful time of the year.

I've devoted more than a couple Bottom
Shelf columns to the scary stuff but it's always been
pretty random. I've never timed a horror column to the holiday it's
associated with. This year, that changes. Every day for the month of
October, expect a new Bottom Shelf
column reviewing something from the genre. There will be movies old
and new, popular and obscure, worth your time and deserving to be
bricked up behind a wall, possibly along with the people
responsible.

Before we start, a special tip o' the severed head goes out to Mr.
Todd Doogan for coming up with the title for this series, a play on
everybody's favorite Electric Theatre
feature. And I'm not sure if I should thank or resent Mr. Bill Hunt
for encouraging me with this insane project. But he's the one who's
gonna have to format 23 columns over the next month, so I'm sure he
regrets it too.

Anyway, sit back, relax and enjoy the next month's worth of scary
monsters and super creeps here at the Hell
Plaza Oktoberfest.

The
Call of Cthulhu
2005 - HPLHS Motion Pictures

H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most famous names in horror
literature. He's a fascinating, often maddeningly difficult
writer whose work, at its best, instills a feeling of dread and
discomfort unlike any other. His writing relies heavily on the
reader's imagination, describing men driven insane by exposure
to forces, beings and creatures they're unable to comprehend or
describe. Not surprisingly, Lovecraft's stories have proven
resistant to adaptation. Even the films of Stuart Gordon,
Lovecraft's most famous cinematic interpreter, veer
significantly away from their source material. As much as I love
Re-Animator and From
Beyond, they don't have a whole lot to do with
Lovecraft's original stories.

Amazingly,
it took Andrew Leman and Sean Branney, two die-hard Lovecraft fans
working with the lowest of low budgets and shooting in borrowed
locations around L.A., to create arguably the first and only
faithful Lovecraft adaptation to date. Based on the 1926 story, The
Call of Cthulhu is told by a man driven mad by his quest
to uncover the secrets of the Cult of Cthulhu, as was his
grandfather before him. The story unfolds in flashbacks and
flashbacks-within-flashbacks, as does Lovecraft's story, laying out
disturbing fragments of a larger story that is only hinted at but
never quite revealed, as there are some things man wasn't meant to
know.

The Call of Cthulhu would be a
daunting challenge for any filmmaker but with limited resources, it
would seem impossible. Not only is it a period piece, it's an epic
story that spans the globe with primitive cult rituals, raging
storms at sea and, of course, Cthulhu itself, maybe the greatest of
Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. But Branney and Leman pull it off thanks
to an idea that would seem to make things even more challenging but
turns out to be a stroke of genius. The
Call of Cthulhu is a silent film, designed and shot to
look and feel like a long-lost artifact from the 1920s. It's a bold
decision and one that could have easily gone horribly wrong.
Instead, it works beautifully. Lovecraft's own writing is often
baroque and highly stylized, reading unlike anything else written by
his contemporaries. By making Cthulhu
silent and mixing old film techniques with modern technology, the
movie feels totally out of time and place. The cast commits to the
project entirely without hamming it up and the terrific musical
score completes the illusion. The stop-motion animation that brings
Cthulhu to life is hardly flawless but is effective and, all things
considered, pretty ingenious.

The disc itself looks pretty darn good and sounds even better, with
the score presented in either "Hi-Fi" or "Mythophonic"
sound (basically, it sounds like it's coming through an antique
gramophone). The intertitles are presented in no less than 24
different languages, everything from Catalan to Welsh. I'm a little
surprised there isn't an Esperanto option. Extras include the
trailer, a very good 28-minute making-of documentary,
behind-the-scenes and production photos, deleted footage and a PDF
file of the prop newspaper from the film. All pretty nifty.

The Call of Cthulhu is a
surprisingly good movie. It's imaginative, entertaining and one of
the most creative pieces of do-it-yourself filmmaking I've seen in a
long, long time. Pop by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's
website at www.cthulhulives.org
and order yourself a copy. You'll be glad you did.